Bush's Mulligan

January 13, 2009

Like our friends at First Read, I thought this was the most interesting nugget in Bush's press conference yesterday. Per the Times:

He also said, for the first time, that he believed he should have pressed immigration reform — he had come to office calling it his first priority — instead of calling for an overhaul of Social Security after the 2004 election.

This strikes me as a much bigger concession than it might appear. Which is to say, doing immigration instead of Social Security in 2005 wouldn't just have been tactically smarter. It would have signalled a completely different approach to his second term, in which he spent his famous "capital" doing something potentially unifying rather than something incredibly divisive and overwhelmingly unpopular outside his wealthy supporters.